Ten years are a long time when it comes to (recent) technologies. The first post on this blog was on the topic of how to present chemistry with three intact dimensions. I had in mind molecular models, molecular isosurfaces and molecular vibrations (arguably a further dimension). Here I reflect on how ten years of progress in technology has required changes and the challenge of how any necessary changes might be kept “under the hood” of this blog.
Posts Tagged ‘JavaScript’
Electronic notebooks: a peek into the future?
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014ELNs (electronic laboratory notebooks) have been around for a long time in chemistry, largely of course due to the needs of the pharmaceutical industries. We did our first extensive evaluation probably at least 15 years ago, and nowadays there are many on the commercial market, with a few more coming from opensource communities. Here I thought I would bring to your attention the potential of an interesting new entrant from the open community.
Test of JSmol in WordPress: the background story.
Sunday, June 8th, 2014A word of explanation about this test page for experimenting with JSmol. Many moons ago I posted about how to include a generated 3D molecular model in a blog post, and have used that method on many posts here ever since. It relied on Java as the underlying software (first introduced in 1996), or almost 20 years ago. Like most software technologies, much has changed, and Java itself (as a compiled language) has had to move to improve its underlying security. In the last year, the Java code itself (in this case Jmol) has needed to be digitally signed in a standard manner, and this meant that many an old site that used unsigned older versions has started to throw up increasingly alarming messages.
Embedding molecules in blogs: ChemDoodle, WebGL and SVG
Friday, December 24th, 2010If you get a small rotatable molecule below, then ChemDoodle/HTML5/WebGL is working. Why might this be important? Well, the future is mobile, in other words, devices that rely on batteries or other sources of built-in power. This means the power guzzling GPU cards of the past (some reach ~400 Watts!) cannot be used. Rather than using e.g. a full power OpenGL library, one will use Web-based graphics libraries, which (to quote Wikipedia) extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser. A typical target device might be for example Apple’s iPad (for which the redoubtable Jmol, which is based on Java, is unlikely to ever work).